Hacker News Reader

Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

The UX world has gone so far backwards, regardless of age, in the last five years it's hard to know where to begin: flat design, washed out colors, thin fonts, buttons that look like badges that look like input boxes that look like borders, modals that take over the entire screen with only a faint x in the upper right corner to indicate what is going on, input fields with internal labels that disappear as soon as anything is entered, and on and on.

Just going back to bootstrap 2, for all its problems, would be a step forward at this point.

View on HN

> flat design, washed out colors

I think these are positive for UX: compare the shotgun blast of color on OS X default icons to the simple, clear shapes of Windows 10's default icons.

Being able to tell things apart at a glance equals a "shotgun blast of color"? We're not talking about the Hotdog Stand theme, you know.

The more methods you use to differentiate things from one another the easier it is to navigate an interface. Abandoning depth so completely was already stupid, mostly-white-on-blue-uniform-squares? You have color, use it! That shit was awesome when I was 19 and wanted to make my XFCE monochrome because I thought it looked cool. It's not awesome when major OS companies copy my awful teenage taste in desktop aesthetic just because it makes for slick-looking screenshots. Please, someone, have better sense than that.

Look, this: https://dri1.img.digitalrivercontent.net/Storefront/Company/...

Is not something to aspire to. If you think that's easy on the eyes I can only assume you never used interfaces back when you could tell one thing from another without having to play Where's Waldo—which, admittedly, was pretty long ago at this point. Look at the buttons on that dialog! Who OK'd that?! Look at those crappy icons that look like the 404-not-found of the icon world! Don't look at where Mail is on the far left. Look at the center of the screen. Tell me which one's mail. Can you even guess? Just tried it on my MacBook, and I could tell what every icon was out of my peripheral vision, thanks to the "shotgun blast of color".

Overuse of color was done because designers could do things like photographic icons, gloss, gradients etc rather than because it makes things more distinguishable for the user.

OS X in particular had multiple levels of shininess which made it hard to distinguish the actual shape of the objects - they learnt their mistake and are attempting to roll it back years after Microsoft popularised digital first design. The Linux DE's haven't even learnt that yet.

Windows mail uses an envelope symbol. It's far more obviously mail than a picture of an eagle flying in the sky with a white scalloped, stamp-like border. Do people even use stamps anymore?

Compare with the OS X-style "Cars: fast as lightning" which I guess is a car but is so detailed I can't really tell.

I won't defend the stamp thing's discoverability (though it's not that bad—and besides, if you know what an envelope is you probably know what a stamp is, and if you don't then it's because you're somehow encountering envelopes exclusively in non-mail contexts so how is that going to be associated with mail for you? Anyway...) but I don't think it matters how appropriate an icon they use if half of them are same-proportioned, white, and sitting in identical blue squares that are mostly wasted ("negative") space, compared with MacOS icons that are larger in proportion to the space they're granted and use color so you can tell what they are without having to look directly at them.

Looking back at Leopard screenshots (I assume that's part of the era with the supposed excessive-shininess?) those icons were slightly worse because smaller (probably configurable though? I don't remember) but their shape seems to be a bit more apparent and distinctive (most of mine on Sierra are squares or circles) so I'd call it a wash, usability-wise. Maybe slightly favoring the new ones because color is easier to distinguish in peripheral vision than shape. I'm not seeing a practical problem with the use of depth, aside from "depth is bad now, because reasons".

Microsoft's Win10 design is like the kind of thing developers come up with when they manage to banish designers from a project—not saying that's what happened, and I doubt it is, but it really looks like it (I can't get over that drop-down box, god, it's like I tried to style it). It's incredibly bad. It reminds me of really old "how to make your web forms pretty" tutorials from the pre-CSS days. I seriously thought I was in some kind of safe-mode when I started it up the first time.

[EDIT] actually, rather than pre-CSS, let's specifically go with "when people used the term DHTML". STRONGLY reminiscent of that time period—but not of finished websites, of web design tutorials from that time period.

> besides, if you know what an envelope is you probably know what a stamp

An envelope is an arbitrary thing that means email. Much like a floppy disk is an arbitrary thing that means save. The postal system and floppy drives are about as relevant as each other.

I prefer the taskbar icon look - ie, raw shape - than the colored background look too. But the raw shapes certainly are far more better than the distracting, detailed pictures which serve only their designers.

The Win10 design is what happens when designers consider users over themselves. I think you're favouring OS X simply because you're familiar with it. But it's clear that Android since 4, OS X since 10.10 are all following the same direction that Microsoft popularised way back in the Zune era.

If you got 1000 people who'd never used a computer before, and asked them to find 'mail' between the 'envelope' and the 'picture of the eagle with the scalloped background' were mail it's predictable what the outcome would be.

You... really think icons are more user-friendly if you take away color differentiation? I find that entirely confusing. It's the result of a "make this interface look like something out of a Mission Impossible movie, we want those screenshots to look slick!" directive, not a user-friendliness effort.

[EDIT] As for familiarity, I started on DOS, was a Windows user from 3.1 through 10 (finally ditched 10 a couple weeks ago because it pissed me off one too many times) including NT3.5 and 4, plus 2K, and mixed in a ton of Linux plus a fair amount of BeOS and a touch of QNX starting around the Win98 era. I've used KDE since IIRC late version 1 or early 2, Gnome since before it was bad, and spent lots of time in both Windowmaker and XFCE for good measure. I've used CDE on Solaris in anger. I only jumped on Apple devices ~5-6 years ago for work. With all that context, I feel confident asserting that the Win10 interface looks like the punchline to a joke that I just don't get—it's got nothing to do with exclusive familiarity with Apple.

Reducing detail focuses on what's important.

I've used all those systems you have, and the worst are ones where someone had tried to use the entire palette or colors and greatest graphic detail in shapes.

Right, now give me 6 apps with the same mail icon and help me find the one I like. The one that supports my mail provider and has my contacts in it. Not the other ones.

The bird is distinct. I know it's thunderbird because that's the icon thunderbird uses. I can upgrade windows and still find it. If you are making things easier for new users but ALSO worse for existing users, you're not doing anyone any good.

I think simple flat design and simple color schemes was a good change, personally. The rest I don't really disagree with.

But you probably "grew up" with the prior, more easily discoverable interface versions. (Remember that when Steve Jobs presented the iPhone, he had to explain the "flick to scroll" gesture, because it was so new - previously, you'd have to touch a tiny triangle in the corner of the scroll view, with a stylus, to scroll... :-)

When I gave my mom an iPad, which already came with the fancy new thin flat iOS design, I had to first switch to a larger, fatter font (thanks, Apple, for making this possible in the Accessibility settings!), and then spend quite some time explaining things, as many controls ("yes mom, that word is actually a button you can press") and gestures were not easily discoverable.

The fat 3D buttons were much easier to discern. (Note that Apple also has a "Button Shapes" settings in Accessibility to re-enable them, though not as "3D". Maybe they could have a global "beginner" or "senior" setting that would switch these settings over from pretty to functional and discoverable...)

iOS 6 was the pinnacle of iOS UI discoverability. I'm still baffled at some of their decisions. That slide-to-unlock element was perfection. It never needed to change because you almost certainly can't do any better (OK, sure, using the home button to trigger unlock now is better, but as far as on the screen unlock initiators, that's it). Any kid or oldster immediately understood it. And 3d-ish buttons are a thing for a reason. It's gotten a little better since the WTF-is-this-shit days of iOS7, but not much.

It went from "what should my grandma use? Definitely an iPad, no question" to "what should my grandma use? Ugh, god, a Chromebook I guess?"

Now force-touch, and new gestures, and crap sliding from the top and bottom of the screen, on top of everything else. It's much easier to get lost in for someone who's half-terrified of computers, which is still lots of people, and I'm not sure it's much better for the rest of us, either.

Flat design is bad UX because it took a useful and familiar dimension, simulated depth, out of the toolbox. I agree that simulated depth was over used and that the minimalist aspect of flat UI did improve aesthetics in many cases, but it was a net loss due to the UX problems it caused. The right thing was to do depth aesthetically correctly (only a few pixels are needed, and only on important elements) while still retaining the usability advantages of it.

Unfortunately the design world (and the art world more generally) appears to be extremely prone to binary thinking: either something is obviously wonderful, or it must be discarded completely.

But all those are UI concerns rather than UX, aren't they?

The UI services the UX

flat design and washed-out colours are great compared to the graphics-and-rounded-edges horror that we used to contend with. Everything else, I agree with - especially around indistinct controls. Modals are fine as long as they have a clear shadow background and there's some kind of cancellation button on the main modal - and also, pressing ESC or clicking the shadow should close a modal. That's just UX 101.

> flat design and washed-out colours are great compared to the graphics-and-rounded-edges horror that we used to contend with

See my sibling comment: flat UI improved default aesthetics but hurt UX. We should have retained simulated depth (and higher contrasts for important UI elements) for the usability advantages. It was a matter of refining what we had, rather than tossing it all out.

flat UI doesn't have to be completely depth-free though. I agree with you when it comes to completely flat (metro-style) design where no depth cues are provided. Material and bootstrap styles are considered flat UI, from what I understand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com